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[WIP]Building Planet Sadwillow

My long-awaited, at least by me , project to detail Sadwillow is just getting off the ground. I'm doing the actual worldbuilding and terrain development on my blog. The first post is here and further posts can be followed via the Sadwillow Project tag at the bottom of the post.

Hopefully, this isn't considered spam. If so I will remove this link and the link from my sig. In any case, this is kind of experimental.

Thanks, I wanted to get the blog to a good start. I have a long line of failed, stupid blogs behind me(well, a few), so I really wanted to make this on work. I've been reading up on blogging the last couple weeks, but I figured if I never actually get started, I would never get started...

I still have some work to do, like populating the Worldbuilder's Bookshelf and finding a less vanilla theme, but I also wanted to put some content up to justify repeat views as I start to get this thing going. I'm trying to assure a cache of daily posts, and I will also keep an eye on the thing.

It's also becoming clear I need to curl up with my Chicago Style Manual tonight...

A little artistic cartography

Although I'm doing my worldbuilding on my blog, I'll still post the cartographical prettiness when it happens.
Here's a nice old-looking Hammer projection of my b/w print version I made for thinking with my hands.

I think I have the start of a sweet map going here. I made the masks and heightfields mostly in Wilbur and made 'em purdy in Photoshop. A lot of layers!

I added strokes with arrowheads in Illustrator. Importing from Illustrator CS into Photoshop CS4 is kind of a chore...

Starting at top-left we have orthographic projections of the south pole and north pole of Sadwillow and below that a plate careé image of oceanic currents across Sadwillow. Notice the lack of pinching at those pole. Run, don't walk to grab yourself a copy of planetGenesis!!!

look really good ... and I'm thinking... I'm never gonna get around to doing stuff like that... all that spherizing... nah, I'll probably stick with good flat maps... like the earth many years ago, before all those "scientists" and explorers ruined it... *lol*

I thought about setting a fantasy world on an infinite plane. How ever far you go, there's more unknown beyond. Plenty of room for Orcs and Ogres and Trolls, and Elves and Dwarves and Halflings and Kobolds and Goblins and Humans and... whatever.

In some places, they might have jet planes and computers and all sorts of wonders, but in our little corner, only a few billion miles away, it's all swords and low sorcery. Somewhere else you could play Master and Commander. I think it would be pretty cool...

But I'm doing this, instead. Space is kinda like that infinite plane. Only all three dimensional-ey.

Spellcheck didn't mind "kinda" or "dimensional-ey," but it went bat poo over spellcheck... and poo.

I like that infinite plane idea. You'd probably have to have large tracts of dead land between vastly different techs or the changes would have to be so subtle as to be unnoticeable. Sounds like a fun idea, though.

If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)

Oh yeah. I just posted a pdf of a veeery rough draft of a chapter in what I hope to be a webbook on conworlding on my blog. Not Sadwillow as such, but it is part of my developing working process for building Sadwillow and other such worlds.